A bike bucket for Peter and a heart-shaped box for Charlotte

We bought Peter a 16" bike last fall because we figured he could grow into it.  Well, turns out he's ready to ride a bike and still many inches away from being tall enough for the 16-incher.  Whoops.  So we bought him a 12" bike today so he could keep up with his leggy older sister on her 16" bike.  Hers has a classic little white plastic wicker basket (complete with flowers attached to it!), and I figured he needed a basket/bucket of his own to tote around his treasures as well.  I clicked back onto the bike bucket tutorial I used for Maisie's birthday present and combined the Stars Wars scraps I had left with some of the flame fabric to make a bucket sufficiently "cool" for Peter's bike.  He calls pink things "girl things" and calls boy things "cool things".  Um, okay.

I altered the pattern a little to make the attaching piece big enough to go around the padded thingy that was on the cross-bar of the handlebars.  I probably added a little too much extra fabric, so for future reference if I make it again, I should cut that piece of fabric to be probably 6" inches wide by 14.5" long.  The bucket still works great and looks cute on Peter's teeny little bike.  Now if I could only teach him how to start pedaling without me giving him a little shove.

I still had the super stiff interfacing out on my work table when I was browsing around on the computer and found a tutorial for a hilarious little heart-shaped box which uses Peltex.  Charlotte saw me looking at the tutorial and insisted that she needed one for her princesses.  The box was fun to make, but BOY did it suck up a bunch of thread.  I started with a full bobbin and had to refill it four times during the project.  Each piece needed to be tightly zig-zagged around, and then they were all attached together with still more tight zig-zagging.  If I had a serger, it would have been a much quicker project I bet.

The pattern called for the underside to be out of a different fabric for some reason.  Good excuse to use up a scrap left over from a long-ago project, I guess.  It would be cute to make a nesting set of these boxes for teacher gifts, but I would have to remember to buy a whole lot of thread beforehand!  Either that, or I could just skip the initial zig-zagging on the pieces, assemble the box, then zig-zag around the top to finish.  Yes, this is the most times I have ever typed "zig-zag" in my entire life.

Charlotte loves the box and is currently using it to transport Lego houses all over the family room.  She's building some kind of epic town and apparently needs to rearrange it frequently.